As noted on another thread, political pundits often compare presidential elections to previous ones. In the case of Romney vs. Obama, conservatives should look north to the Dominion of Celine Dion and Maple Syrup. This is a repeat of John Tory vs. Dalton McGuinty, the 2007 election in Ontario during which the two candidates contested governance of Canada's largest province.

The only difference, other than citizenship, is that John Tory was not Mormon. He was a nominal Protestant, for the most part indistinguishable from the Kennedy Catholic he was challenging. Nevertheless, religion would cost him the election.

As Ontario Liberal Party leader and provincial Premier, Dalton McGuinty was the equivalent to the governor of a province representing 40 percent of Canada's population. He was to the left of Obama, and less charismatic. One could describe McGuinty as Ted Kennedy with Al Gore's charisma. Most political pundits believed he would lose his re-election campaign for a second term as he polled well below his party's popularity, he had shifted the province to the left of the NDP (Ontario's official socialist party), and destroyed the economy by taxing businesses and the middle-class. Despite claiming to be a devout Catholic, McGuinty had also pushed abortion and the gay agenda in schools, while presiding over the legalization of same-sex marriage not only in Ontario, but all of Canada. With apologies to conservatives everywhere, Dalton made Obama look like Reagan.

How had McGuinty won his first term in office? After all, Canada is liberal, but not that liberal. Basically, McGuinty had not so much won his first term in office as his opponent on the right, the Progressive Conservative Party, had lost it.

Dalton McGuinty's opponent during the prior election had been Ernie Eves. Ernie was a moderate, living with an old wealthy woman, and a squish for the party establishment. Ernie could be described as John McCain, minus the pro-life conviction and war hero status.

Yet Dalton had not really run against Ernie. He had run against Mike Harris, Ernie's immediate predecessor, who had been elected premier on a hard conservative mandate. Mike Harris proved himself a true conservative during his first term, but went soft during his second term, became very unpopular, and would resign before the end of the term. In American terms, Harris spent his first term as Reagan, his second term turned into Bush's, and ended up a little short of Nixon's.

Thus the Ontario electorate had not voted for McGuinty over Eves, they had voted against Harris.

Along comes John Tory, a wealthy corporate executive and establishment CINO from the most liberal city in the province. He had worked closely with several Red Tory politicians, which is Canadian-speak for RINO. (In Canada, conservatives are blue, liberals are red, and socialists are orange). Tory promised to chart a moderate course Ontario conservatives, and beat out his conservative opponents for party leadership with help from the Red Tory establishment and mainstream media who deemed Tory the most electable. The Red Tory establishment ignored the fact Tory won most of his delegates to the leadership convention from electoral ridings that voted Liberal or Socialist in the general election. (Whereas those districts that elected conservatives to office had split the vote among Tory's conservative opponents.)

As party leader, John Tory attacked pro-lifers, rural conservatives and gun activists. He blamed a lack of gun control (and his predecessor Mike Harris) for gun crime in Ontarios big cities. He openly worked against social conservatives and Christians, while marching in the Toronto Gay Pride Parade - the largest in the world. A number of social conservatives who were prepared to vote for Tory anyway, under the banner of "Anyone but McGuinty", changed their mind after two events:

First, at a gay pride event shortly after Canada legalized same-sex marriage, Tory posed for the media, receiving a kiss from a homosexual transvestite entertainer. Yes, you read that right. He was not caught. He posed for the picture, at a time when social conservative morale was at its lowest point since decades earlier when Canada decriminalized abortion.

The second incident took place during the hotly-contested federal (Canada-wide) election the following winter. Conservatives and Liberals were in a dead heat (think Bush vs. Gore), and every vote counted - especially as the liberals had been in power for over a decade. John Tory chose the middle of the federal campaign, about two weeks before voting day, to attack his federal counterpart Stephen Harper (Canada's Dick Cheney in both policy and personality, with the tactical mind of Karl Rove). Why? Because Harper and the federal conservatives had opposed same-sex marriage.

Which such "severe" conservative credentials, nobody was surprised when the 2007 provincial election came along and Tory's policy platform was for the most part indistinguishable from McGuintys. Tory even instructed his candidates to downplay the name of the party, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, which contained the word Conservative, because it might remind voters of Mike Harris or Stephen Harper. Instead, he had his candidates run as John Tory candidates on signs, campaign literature and when giving press interviews.

Although Tory basically promised to implement the same leftist policies as Dalton, he promised to do a better job implementing them and managing the province. After all, he had corporate experience whereas his opponent Dalton was a life-long politician and political activist. What Canadians call a community activist.

And it was at this point that religion became an issue in the campaign. The campaign turned boring pretty quickly as Wealthy Establishment Leftist (Conservative) ran against Upper Middle-Class Leftist (Liberal). Voters and media were looking for a policy or issue to distinguish the two candidate.

There was only one. Believe it or not, it was intended to appease social conservatives who - unenthused, if not clinically depressed, by Tory's pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, and pro-gay agenda policies - were refusing to donate time or money to the Conservative campaign, and were threatening to stay home or vote for a third party on election day. Some of the real conservatives running under Tory had asked him, as a bone to help their local campaigns, to agree to school-vouchers and/or tax breaks for parents who homeschool or send their children to private religious schools.

In a "severely" conservative moment, Tory agreed. However, he would do it his way, and not the way proposed by actual conservatives running as "John Tory" candidates. In other words, he would not agree to their sketch, he would etch it himself. And there is nothing conservatives could do about it, after all who else where they going to vote for? McGuinty?

So Tory reset the etch-a-sketch and promised public funding to religious private schools (excluding Catholic, which are already publicly funded under Canada's constitution). In Ontario, these schools are predominately Muslim, with Christian schools a close second. The catch? The schools would have to agree to the pro-abortion and pro-gay public school curriculum.

Religion and school funding soon became the dominant theme of the campaign. Needless to say, John Tory got hammered from all sides. The left accused him of undermining public education in promising funding for religious schools. Moderates and independents accused Tory of promoting religious extremism since the religious schools in question were predominately Christian or Muslim. Christians and Muslims accused Tory of being a Trojan Horse for cultural Marxism in tying the funding to a public school curriculum that promotes abortion and the gay agenda.

Despite very low approval rating, Dalton won a second term. He even increased his seat majority.

Yeh I know...right? Mitt Romney is such an eerily comparison to the Michael Dukakis debacle. What really opens my eyes to how dark the liberals agenda is, is how they change historical facts (Obama misquoting Reagan for one example) to suit their needs without blinking an eye...they must be brainwashed, possessed, or blinded to any kind of truth by some greater power...or spiritual deception?

3
posted on 04/12/2012 10:22:00 AM PDT
by Rainwave
(Happy Easter! and happy Passover!...still praying for the peace of Jerusalem.)

Welcome to FR, NCC. Good analysis but there are a couple of other points to add:

1. The biggest cause of Eves’ defeat was the first budget after he became Premier in which he cancelled a tax cut and ramped up spending. Harris Tories stayed home in droves; if you compare the popular vote and voter turnout between the 1999 and 2003 elections, you’ll notice that the drop in Tory support was almost equal to to drop in turnout.

2. One of the factors that turned off many conservatives in 2007 was the fact that Tory was once CEO of Rogers Communications, Canada’s most entrenched crony capitalist organization. His entire career was spent currying government favour for his company at the expense of competitors and consumers.

This time around I think Dalton won because Hudak ran such a mediocre campaign. The results were close but the Tories could have won it had they been in attack mode from the moment the writ was dropped.

I wasn’t. If we’re comparing states to provinces, California is British Columbia with its extremely leftist city and costal folk, while the more rural inland is hardcore conservative.

Ontario, on the other hand, is like New York State, D.C., Michigan and New Hampshire annexed into one (With Toronto being New York City, Ottawa being Washington, Windsor being Detroit, and Northern Ontario being New Hampshire and the Michigan U.P.)

But I remember visiting friends in Canada during that election. What surprised me is how differently they perceived the candidates depending upon where they lived.

In Toronto, conservatives viewed Tory as “the lesser of two evils” whereas in the rest of the province, particularly in rural areas, could not decide whether Tory was the second coming of Obama bin Laden or Barney Frank. That’s why so many Northern Ontario conservatives voted NDP (socialist): at least they could trust NDP leader Howard Hampton - also from northern Ontario - to represent them on northern and rural issues. You know the choices are bad when conservative voters are ignoring the socialist candidate’s record while in Bob Rae’s cabinet.

“OTOH, so many immigrants in Ontario who are pandered to by the libs,”

One cannot blame the immigrant vote for this one. In fact, quite the opposite. Having retained their traditional family values from the old country, and appalled by the legalization of same-sex marriage, by the time the Ontario election rolled around, the immigrant vote had already started its shift to the Conservative Party federally. It was this shift, along with a similar shift among Catholic voters, that replaced the federal Liberal dynasty with Stephen Harper’s Conservative minority during the preceding federal election.

John Tory could have built provincially on Harper’s federal inroads into the immigrant community. Instead he put forward the public funding policy. I recall talking to a Muslim friend of mine in Ottawa that I had met through the traditional marriage movement.

He described Muslim reaction to me as follows: “Secular and moderate Muslims are horrified because they think Tory will fund the extremists. Their whole reason for coming to Canada was to get away from the Sharia. On the other hand, Muslim traditionalists are upset because they think Tory is trying to impose the gay agenda upon their children.”

Of course my Christian friends in Ontario were scared Tory would do both.

It's not even a question of who would make a better President that will decide this election if Romney wins the GOP nomination. Democrats tend to vote along party lines while Republicans (especially conservatives) vote their principles. That's the fact. It does not matter if you like Romney or if I like Romney. The man is known to lie to your face rather than admit (like Newt has done in the past) what he's been exposed on and concede that it was stupid on his part.

What's going to decide this election (If Romney is 'our' guy) is self-respect. I cannot vote for a man who tells me he was ALWAYS a Reagan conservative and a pro-lifer and everything else he claims when it's well known that he's taken every side of every issue based only on winning an election (A LA John Kerry).

I cannot vote for a man who lies to me for my vote. There's no way Mitt Romney will win the general election.

Has Michelle Obama ever worked a day in her life? I’m not talking about that phony baloney “job” she had with that Chicago hospital where she was paid 300 gs for not showing up. I mean a real job. If she hasn’t, does anyone think for a second that these same Dem hypocrites wouldn’t attack any conservative for claiming she never worked a day outside the house?

Thanks for the warm welcome, and for providing some more perspective on the situation. While I consider myself reasonably informed on Canadian politics, admittedly I don’t always pick up on the local nuance. So I appreciate your additional insight.

This is interesting, but very hard to read. US readers have to keep all these people we haven't heard of straight and process all the US politicians you throw in as parallel to the Canadian ones.

Stephen Harper as Canada's Dick Cheney looks like a left-wing talking point. I don't know enough about Harper, but I hope it's not true (sorry, I'm no Cheney fan).

I can see the parallel between Tory and Romney as far as it goes, but Tory sounds like one of those inexperienced figures the Canadian establishment loves to parachute into the top job (Trudeau, Ignatieff).

By contrast, Romney's been campaigning for some time. He's not starting at the bottom and doesn't have the most experience in politics, but it sounds like he's ahead of Tory so far as political experience goes.

Mitt Romney may not be a convincing conservative to conservatives, but he's not taking the kind of stands in his campaign that it sounds like Tory did. Rather, it's his past record that comes back to haunt him.

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